Various Artists

Inès

Young producer Nicolas Jaar issues a sharp collection from his Clown & Sunset imprint that offers intriguing new horizons in minimal.

Ever since Ricardo Villalobos forged a 17-minute club anthem out of a looped piano riff and children chanting in Spanish (2007's "Enfants (Chants)"), minimal's narrative of rewriting the definition of club music has felt exhausted (more kindly: completed). The astonishingly young Nicolas Jaar has emerged in the shadow of that endpoint, and he has pursued a sound that cuts diagonally across modern house and techno's continuum of revivalist simplicity to outré sound design. This range can be heard from his straightforwardly lush disco edits to the generous use of silence and repetition on his forthcoming solo album, Space Is Only Noise.

It's as if Jaar is simply adding new lines across post-minimal's completed coloring book, straining through sheer craft to change the tone and feel of the pictures. This restlessness gives his work the feel of being transitory, offering no statement of a fully formed aesthetic, only snapshots of resting places between one mode and the next. Somewhat perversely, the most coherent articulation of Jaar's approach is captured on a release not even in his name. Strictly speaking, Inès is a compilation of output on Jaar's experiment-slanted Clown & Sunset label, though as compilations go it's very single-minded: four of the 10 tracks here are from Jaar, and he collaborates with artists Soul Keita and Nikita Quasim on two others, while Keita and Quasim offer two solo tracks each.

Inès is also single-minded in feel in spite of its sonic diversity, each track asking different versions of the same questions: what is the relationship between groove and non-groove, between chaos and order? Does the sun shine more brightly if it suddenly emerges from behind clouds? While stylistic contexts differ, from the softly popping Jan Jelinek downtempo of Quasim's "Freshman Year" with its woozy accelerations and decelerations, to the loping blues-disco stomp of Jaar's "Love You Gotta Lose Again" to the morose and mysterious instrumental hip-hop of Keita's "Dusties N 808s", everything here points to an underlying sensibility of absolute looseness finding itself pressed into the service of the beat.

If that sounds like Downtempo 101, well, it is; Inès' point of distinction is the deliberateness of its constructions. They are simultaneously more fragmentary and more intricate, more tentative and more precise than your standard narcoleptic headnodder, with tracks that are rigid with barely restrained tension. So, the seemingly adrift piano tinkles of Jaar's "Tribute to My Mother" become drawn into a cat's-cradle of electronic zaps and buzzing bass surges, while on his "Dubliners" papery rustles and scratches gradually coalesce into an eerie percussive house groove, like cells becoming molecules before your eyes. Best of all is the entire collective's "Her String", where succulent hand percussion and live bass build to a gorgeously deliquescent flamenco guitar solo.

With its fragile, whispery pools and eddies of sound, Inès recalls the rhythmically attenuated constructions of Villalobos (in particular his Achso EP) but also Henrik Schwarz's naturalist dance music fusions. But unlike these artists, Jaar and company remain determinedly small scale, preferring to offer carefully constructed pinnacles that never outstay their welcome. As such, it's easy to dismiss Inès as a minor work, to conclude that the delicacy of its articulations feel hard-won only because they're staged that way. All of which is true, but once you're on the album's microscopic level of activity even the slightest developments feel immensely evocative.